Question by agiro · Dec 13, 2016 at 08:14 PM · performance performance optimization

Unity's performance

Greetings, I've read about the topic and found a lot of users complain about Unity's performance and how poorly it is optimised. I'm developing a 2D mobile game alone using Unity and this concerns me much as I want as many to play my game as possible. According to your experiences, is Unity all that badly optimized? If so, which parts of it? I admit most of those complains were on graphics and I don't know if they use a 3rd party shader system. I'm using sprites only, mostly pre-rendered, very few image effects and a self-made gif player for animations. Thanks in advance.

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hexagonius · Dec 13, 2016 at 09:00 PM 1

from my experience I would say unity is well optimized considering it uses a cross compiler. And I would also claim that many don't know how to optimize from their side and therefore hit the roof pretty fast (donno if that's a saying, I'm German :D). But from what you've described, making a game shouldn't be that much of a problem. just look up a few professional titles and what they did with unity and then ask again ;)

Pengocat hexagonius · Dec 13, 2016 at 09:23 PM 0

I agree with hexagonius. Inexperienced developers quickly jump to the conclusion that the engine is not optimized when things start to slow down, before even looking at the profiler to figure out the cause of the slowdown. Those who first developed a game for PC who then get a task of making a mobile game often forget that developing for mobile is like going back 5-10 years and you need to consider that it is running on battery, so you can't suck out 100% performance all the time without draining the battery in $$anonymous$$utes.

agiro hexagonius · Dec 13, 2016 at 09:48 PM 0

You make sense there. By the way in your experience, are Unity's collision system and whatnot, so not graphics components well optimized?

Pengocat · Dec 13, 2016 at 09:33 PM 0

Shaders used on mobile needs to be designed for mobile in order to get any resonable performance. $$anonymous$$obile devices have a very limited fillrate compared to PC's so Image effects and transparency needs to be used as little as possible.

agiro Pengocat · Dec 13, 2016 at 09:39 PM 0

Thanks for the replies. The ones I mentioned were probably talking about games for console/pc. $$anonymous$$y image effects are $$anonymous$$imal, saying only that multiply, screen, and so on and used very rarely. Transparency is where I'm at :D As for my optimizations, I never use the sorts like GameObject.Find runtime, only in Awake or so. I use Coroutines as much as possible, the works. And use the $$anonymous$$imal sprite size possible that makes the image not jagged.

Pengocat agiro · Dec 13, 2016 at 09:51 PM 0

Also remember to keep an eye on memory allocation that eventually trigger the garbage collector.

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Pengocat · Dec 13, 2016 at 11:45 PM 0

When using the profiler look for spikes in $$anonymous$$emory for "GC allocated". There is a lot of tips for preventing generating a lot of garbage, but one important note is to cache reference types that are frequently used. Just remember not to spend too much time on optimising before looking at the profiler to confirm or disprove it's impact. Spending a lot of time on 0.0001ms. increased performance is not very cost effective.